A life of thought

How do most people live without any thoughts? There are many people in the world, — you must have noticed them in the street, — how do they live? How do they get strength to put on their clothes in the morning?

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?

(from Letter to Colonel T. W. Higginson written by Emily Dickinson, 1870; reprinted in The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Martha Dickinson Bianchi, p. 276)

Art from the chaos

“...what makes me feel as though I belong here out in this world is not the teacher, not the mother, not the lover, but what goes on in my mind when I am writing. Then I belong here and then all of the things that are disparate and irreconcilable can be useful. I can do the traditional things that writers always say they do, which is to make order out of chaos. Even if you are reproducing disorder, you are sovereign at this point. Struggling through the work is extremely important—more important to me than publishing it."

(If you didn't do this...?) 

"Then I would be part of the chaos."

--from “Toni Morrison, The Art of Fiction,” (Interview with Toni Morrison, 1993) in The Paris Review Interviews, II, p. 366.

Finding a wrinkle in time through art

When we are self-conscious, we cannot be wholly aware; we must throw ourselves out first. This throwing ourselves away is the act of creativity. So, when we wholly concentrate, like a child in play, or an artist at work, then we share in the act of creating. We not only escape time, we also escape our self-conscious selves.

(Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet, p. 11)

Words that didn't go away

That all my dreams might not prove empty, I have been writing this useless account—though I doubt it will long survive me.

(Lady Nijō, c. 1307, The Confessions of Lady Nijō; translated by Karen Brazell, Stanford University Press, 1976, p. 264.)

The loneliness of the solo artist

I also think that process by which you become a writer is a pretty lonely one. We don't have a group apprenticeship like a violinist might training for an orchestra, or a ballet student might being in a company that does ballets. We don't have any of that. We write on our own time, we write when we can.

Anne Rice, from A Fan's Interview with Anne Rice, The Borzoi Reader Online.

Why make the effort?

Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort. If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass.

(Note: This is an oft-mentioned quote from Fran Lebowitz, but I haven't been able to find the exact source yet; will add later).

The lost words of women

I believe that every line a woman writes announces her. Perhaps it is that very fear of announcing herself that summons her to begin writing and causes her to halt in her tracks before nary a word is penned.

(from "On Writing Women's Autobiography" by Janet Lynn Roseman, from The Way of the Woman Writer, p. 13)

Art as a form of survival

We need art to live fully and to grow healthy. Without it we are dry husks drifting aimlessly on every ill wind, our futures without promise and our present without grace.

(Maya Angelou, "Art for the Sake of the Soul," in Even the Stars Look Lonesome, p.133)

Unfavorable conditions for a writer

When a woman was liable, as she was in the fifteenth century, to be beaten and flung about the room if she did not marry the man of her parents' choice, the spiritual atmosphere was not favourable to the production of works of art.

(Virginia Woolf, in "Women and Fiction," in Women and Writing, p. 45)

Creating art with limited moments of solitude

I have made for myself the following credo: it is perhaps true that a mind freed of care creates the "best" art. But I do not strive to create "good" art; I simply strive to continue creating.

--Katherine Smith, "The Artist as Single Mother," reprinted in Sleeping with One Eye Open, p. 94.

The body as writing paper

"I learnt to write when I was almost six and at the same time also discovered the magic of my own body as a writing surface....

"We felt the words in gradual bursts of pain, the first words we had written would become less felt, the pain of that scratching now faded, and the last words where we had dug too deep would be pulsating still, unable to be quiet."

(from "Writing Near the Bone" by Yvonne Vera, in Women Writing Africa: Volume 1: The Southern Region)

Making time to write--by losing sleep

"Empowerment is what the emerging artist needs to win for herself. And the initial sense of urgency to create can easily be dissipated because it entails making the one choice many people, especially women, in our society with its emphasis on the 'acceptable' priorities, feel selfish about making: taking the time to create, stealing it from yourself if it's the only way."

-- "5:00 A.M.: Writing as Ritual" in The Latin Deli by Judith Ortiz Cofer, p. 168 (reprinted in Sleeping With One Eye Open)

The whispers of grandmothers

"You remember thinking while braiding your hair that you look a lot like your mother and her mother before her. It was their whispers that pushed you, their murmurs over pots sizzling in your head. A thousand women urging you to speak through the blunt tip of your pencil."

(from "Women Like Us" by Edwidge Danticat, reprinted in reprinted in Word. On Being a Woman Writer, 2004.).

Not having it all

"Children. There's the rub; I accept that childlessness might become the price I pay for my decision to become a writer.... I do not believe that I can 'have it all'— that is, that I can be effective both as a mother and as a writer."

(from "Earning Virginia Woolf's Room" by Eileen Tabios, included in the anthology, Sleeping with One Eye Open, edited by Marilyn Kallet and Judith Ortiz Cofer, 1999).

Birthing creativity

"There's so much that I don't want to die with. Not sharin it with somebody. That's what give me the idea to do a book because I have so much experience in here that I want to explode."

(from Motherwit: An Alabama Midwife's Story by Onnie Lee Logan, Katherine Clark, 1989; excerpted in The Norton Book of Women's Lives, edited by Phyllis Rose, 1993)

The heartbreak of the tenderness of being

"The stuff I need for singing by whatever means is garnered from every thought, every heart that ever pounded the earth, the intelligence that directs the stars. The shapes of mountains, cities, a whistle leaf of grass, or a human bent with loss will revise the pattern of the story, the song. I take it from there, write or play through the heartbreak of the tenderness of being until I am the sky, the earth, the song and the singer."

(from "Finding the Groove" by Joy Harjo, reprinted in Word. On Being a Woman Writer, 2004.).

There is no essential truth about being a female writer

"There is no essential truth about being a female writer. The best writing comes from the boundaries, the ungendered spaces between male and female.....

"I like to think of writing in limitless terms, with no particular contract with the reader, especially that of gender. When I have discovered that unmarked and fearless territory then I am free to write, even more free to be a woman writing. Sometimes the light coming through my window has been much more important than the fact that I am a woman writing."

(from "Writing Near the Bone" by Yvonne Vera, in Women Writing Africa: Volume 1: The Southern Region, p. 488-) 

--Submitted by Beth Blevins.

Writing in a magic house

"No one tried to dissuade me from writing; they simply talked about what I would do to make a living. Writing, in their eyes, could be done when one came home from work. It was not that they did not respect writing. It was that they saw it as having nothing to do with real life... I was not at all interested in making a living. I thought then that my destiny could be just like Emily Dickinson's. I could stay alone in my little house and write. Of course as a young girl believing in magic I did not think in concrete terms about how I would acquire the house, the means to survive. I thought it would happen like magic. I let no one dissuade me from my dream of becoming a writer."

(from Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work, by bell hooks)

Life in the margins

"The mathematics of our lives, the practice runs that make up what we offer the public as real, are proven in the margins. We whisper there, perfecting what we want others to hear, often editing out truth. And yes, we dream there... Women writers have practiced our craft from the outskirts. Our lenses have been aimed at the public spaces which have marginalized our voices....To find ourselves we hold up a mirror to the worlds we all inhabit."

(from "Foreword: From the Margin to the Page" by Suheir Hammad, in Word. On Being a [Woman] Writer, edited by Jocelyn Burrell)

--Submitted by Beth Blevins.

To not be forgotten

"I will and bequeath this book after my husband and myself are through with it, to my oldest grandson Bertie Williams....I trust what is worthy of emulation he may profit by.

"It is of more value to me than it could possibly be to my children, but I desire that it shall be kept in the family and treasured as a relic of by-gone days, not from any especial merit it possesses, but because I do not want to be forgotten."

(from Mollie: The Journal of Mollie Dorsey Sanford in Nebraska and Colorado Territories, 1857-1866, by Mollie Dorsey Sanford, U of Nebraska Press, 2003. p. xx).

Kicking the door off the hinges

"I had sworn my love to Graham (Nash) in a way that I didn't think was possible for myself. And he wanted me to marry him. I had agreed to it. And then I just started thinking. My grandmother was a frustrated poet and musician, she kicked the kitchen door off the hinges, on the farm. I thought about my paternal grandmother who wept for the last time in her life at 14, behind some barn because she wanted a piano, and said, 'Dry your eyes, you silly girl, you'll never have a piano.'

"And I thought, maybe I'm the one that got the gene that has to make it happen for these two women. As much as I loved and cared for Graham, I thought, I'm going to end up like my grandmother, kicking the door off the hinges. And it's like, I better not. And it broke my heart."

(Joni Mitchell, speaking in the documentary, Joni Mitchell: Woman of Heart and Mind, part of the American Masters series on PBS; 2003.)

--Transcribed by Beth Blevins.

A dog's life

"Every dispassionate investigator of the subject has agreed that woman's comparative lack of accomplishment cannot be entirely due to her not having enjoyed such opportunities, as in music, the arts, philosophy, spiritual leadership, invention, and science; yet until recently their accomplishments in these fields have been far from startling. Why have there been so few outstanding representatives of the female sex in these fields? There are many reasons....

"The truth is that if it is continually being reiterated that the individual belongs to a group that has never achieved anything and never will, and that everything ever achieved in the world has been accomplished by persons of another kind;... if you make laws to prevent her from owning property as well as laws that assign her to an inferior position in the hierarchy of statuses; if you exclude her from all activities except those limited to the menial tasks of domesticity and executing the will of her superior in looking after children; and if you conduct yourself as if you were her natural lord and master, you will succeed, have no doubt of it, in convincing her that such is the natural order of things. You may, in fact, succeed to such an extent as to engender a doglike fidelity and an utter devotion to the principle that dog is dog and master is master, each occupying the station to which God and nature have called them."

(from “Women and Creativity” in The Natural Superiority of Women, Fifth Edition, 1999 by Ashley Montagu [original edition published in 1953]; p. 204)

-- Submitted by Beth Blevins

On the absence of female writers as literary characters

"(T)he girl or woman who tries write...goes to poetry or fiction looking for her way of being in the world, since she has been putting words and images together; she is looking eagerly for guides, maps, possibilities; and over and over...she comes up against something that negates everything she is about: she meets the image of Woman in books written by men. She finds a terror and a dream, she finds a beautiful pale face, she finds La Belle Dame Sans Merci, she finds Juliet or Tess or Salome, but precisely what she does not find is that absorbed, drudging, puzzled, sometimes inspired creature, herself, who sits at a desk trying to put words together."

(from "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision" in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence by Adrienne Rich, p.39)

The path of writing

"When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year."

(from “The Writing Life” by Annie Dillard, included in Landmark Essays on Writing Process, edited by Sondra Perl, p. 225)

-- Submitted by Beth Blevins

Why Barbara Kingsolver became a writer

"... She is asked how she knew, as a young woman growing up in a rural area in Kentucky, that she would always work to support herself.

"Because I am flat-chested," she says flatly. She explains:

"I was 5-9 and weighed 99 pounds. The basis of value for women in my county was very primal. It was strictly in reproductive terms. The most popular girls were the ones who were the most physically mature; they married and had babies very young. I could see that I was not going to be a success in the world of Nicholas County, and that I needed to get out and find some other way to excel.

"And I have."

(from "Novelist In Hog Heaven; `Pigs' Brings Home the Bacon While Its Author Writes Her Heart Out" by Megan Rosenfeld. The Washington Post, Jul 14, 1993. pg. D.01)

-- Submitted by Beth Blevins

Writing as covert action

“For most of her life Jane Austen had little opportunity to indulge in solitude. She herself was almost never beyond the reach of family, or out of touch with friends.

“To write is to be self-conscious, as Jane Austen certainly knew. What flows onto paper is more daring or more covert than a writer's own voice.... Composing—and this is the term she generally used—was done in the family sitting room, and it is said, famously, that she quickly covered over the manuscript page when someone else entered unexpectedly, or slipped the pages inside her small mahogany desk.”

(from Jane Austen by Carol Shields, pp. 120-121)

-- Submitted by Beth Blevins

If Katherine Hepburn had had a child...

"If I'd had a child," she said, "and the child got sick and was crying just as I had to leave for the theatre, where hundreds of people were waiting for me to perform, and I had to make a choice--the play or the child--well, I'd smother the child to death and go on with the show. You just can't have both," she said with frightening certainty, "a career and children."

(Katherine Hepburn, quoted by Jane Fonda, in My Life So Far, by Jane Fonda, p. 428.)

--Submitted by Chandra Garsson

How much it takes to become a writer...

"How much it takes to become a writer. Bent (far more common than we assume), circumstances, time, development of craft—but beyond that: how much conviction as to the importance of what one has to say, one's right to say it. And the will, the measureless store of belief in oneself to be able to come to, cleave to, find the form for one's own life comprehensions. Difficult for any male not born into a class that breeds such confidence. Almost impossible for a girl, a woman."

(from Silences by Tillie Olsen, p. 27)

-- Submitted by Beth Blevins

Another list of childless female writers

"Think of the literature of writers Dorothy Parker, Ayn Rand, Lillian Hellman, Beatrix Potter, Isak Dinesen, Rachel Carson, Margaret Mitchell, Jane Austen, Helen Keller, Emily Bronte, and Simone de Beauvoir.... These women have enriched our lives immensely in ways other than bringing children into the world."

(from The Childless Revolution: What It Means to Be Childless Today by Madelyn Cain, p. 160)

-- Submitted by Beth Blevins

The poet as typist

"I am more happy than if it was my book published! I have worked so closely on these poems of Ted's and typed them so many countless times through revision after revision that I feel ecstatic about it all.

"I am so happy his book is accepted first. . . . I can rejoice, then, much more, knowing Ted is ahead of me."

(from Letters Home by Sylvia Plath, edited by Aurelia Schober Plath, p. 297; letter written on Feb. 24, 1957)

-- Submitted by Beth Blevins

Virginia Woolf on women

"And again I am reminded by dipping into newspapers and novels and biographies that when a woman speaks to women she should have something very unpleasant up her sleeve. Women are hard on women. Women dislike women. Women—but are you not sick to death of the word? I can assure you that I am."

(Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, p. 115).

-- Submitted by Beth Blevins

Childless German writers

..."a considerable portion of women's lives was devoted to life-threatening childbirths and time-consuming child-rearing. It is not surprising, therefore, that a disproportionately large number of women writers were childless (half of the authors in this anthology!), or that women wrote before they were married and after their children had reached adulthood."

(from Bitter Healing: German Women Writers from 1700 to 1830. Jeannine Blackwell, Susanne Zantop. 1990, p. 22.)

-- Submitted by Beth Blevins

A mother and daughter disagree

"Sometimes she [my daughter] tells me of the pain she felt in childhood because I was so often working and not to be distracted, or off on some mysterious pilgrimage, the importance of which, next to herself, she could not understand."

(from Anything We Love Can Be Saved by Alice Walker, p. 45--from a speech given in 1990).

"She was a part of and still is a part of the women's movement,'' Rebecca says, "and there is a sense that young women had been made dependent and kept dependent in many ways. She thought by allowing me this great, independent childhood that I would be more independent and stronger as an adult. I don't think she thought she was being neglectful. I think she thought this was a good, fine thing, to let me experience the world alone.''

(from an interview with Rebecca Walker, daughter of Alice Walker, in the Washington Post, 2001; available on her web site.)

-- Submitted by Beth Blevins